often it is the only / thing / between you and impossibility / no drink / no woman's love / no wealth/ can / match it / nothing can save you/ except writing.
Charles Bukowski

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Five Qs with Noah Cicero

1.
What do you enjoy most about writing?

Writing
dialogue.

2.
If you could choose one book (any book) that best describes you which
would it be?

Of
Mice and Men

3.
Do you feel hopeful or hopeless about humanity? Like as far as world
peace and if we'll be around much longer?

On
Netflix and on television there are a lot of 'civilization is
destroyed' themed narratives, because those are easy narratives to
write, and it catches people's attention. Those narratives, ask
Cormac McCarthy lol, jerk off. It is so easy to write a world ends
story, everything you need is there, alienation, paradigm shift, loss
of hope, redemptive moments, forest scenes, moral choices, it is
easy, even the most untalented writer could pull at least one 'end of
the world' narrative out of their ass.

The
narrative is not true though, mankind can live without oil and
natural gas, China had like 900 million people in 1975 and barely
used any oil or natural gas, and they lived. And when things got hard
20 million died, but they went on. America, Central America and South
America have epic amounts of good farm land, we have so much food we
make Cheetos and Dunkin Donuts and turn some of it into fuel for cars
and then use some for tobacco, we have so much land for food it is
insane.

Think
about it like this: all we need to live is potatoes, some wheat and
eggs, maybe throw in an apple every third day. It is just that
everyday we eat high tech meals, for me I eat organic wild blueberry
jelly, frozen tortellini, pop tarts, blueberry scones in a cute
little plastic package. Those foods are high-tech, they are put
together in factories and packaged and designed to be cooked quickly.
Well, you could easily go to a grocery store and just eat potatoes,
bread, peanut butter, apples, eggs and not die. But we never think
that like that.

I
think what is happening, is that the Renaissance or the Age of
Enlightenment is over, science and technology did not save us, the
farthest we ever got was the moon, we couldn't even cure psoriasis or
diabetes, 96% of the universe is dark matter and dark energy and we
don't even know what that is, science and technology has led to
global warming and epic environmental destruction, capitalism never
made more than 20% of the population happy in very specific countries
and it discards the bottom 20% as garbage. And this just makes people
feel fucked inside, which has led a lot of people to investigate
Buddhism and chakras and crystals, because we've come to realize that
lying on your bedroom floor with a crystal on your forehead is more
calming and fun than watching television or buying things endlessly.
Millennials have really woken up to the absolute dumbassery joke
mockery that is our civilization.

I
think what people are really afraid of, is the mid 2020s, several big
moments are coming then, the older population that votes Republican
will either be infirm in hospital beds or dead, the Hispanic
population will have grown in states like Texas to such a point that
a Republican pres candidate will never get voted in again, no
gerrymandering is going to save the Republicans in the 2020s. It will
be obvious that the Republicans are doomed in the 2020s, which means
the rich will have no where to go to get their immoral laws made (But
I don't know what this means exactly, the Democrats take a lot of
corporate money, so the Democrats could turn into Republicans, they
are basically 70s Republicans now, but Democrats aren't
racist/homophobic/women hating like Republicans are, and I don't
think the Democrats would ever go that far to the right. Which makes
it exciting, because no one knows what will happen.)

Also
at this time, it seems like gas prices might get up to $8 to $10 a
gallon, which would basically destroy people making less than $40,000
a year, which is a lot of people.

And
there is the problem of the economy, there is no innovation in the
economy, everyone is really proud to work for corporations and the
service economy, there doesn't seem to be any attempt at all to
rebuild the manufacturing base or bring younger people into farming,
and the government gives 2/3rds of its subsidies to farmers that grow
food for animals to become meat, fucking joke

I
think 'the fear' is that technology did not create a utopia, and that
utopia actually means slave labor hidden away making all the white
man's toys and food, so he can sit on top of his throne looking down
at brown people and scruffy white trash smiling like a devil.

Sometimes
I think that the white male Republicans are destroying everything
with such powerful emotion and enthusiasm because they hate the idea
of brown and black races and women having what they have so much,
they want to blow it all up in some kind of crazy anarchist/Russian
nihilist dick move of the century. It just kills them to see a black
person president, and it is gonna kill them when they see a woman
president, they are close minded/bitter/self loathing/out of
shape/sad people, they like to cause pain, they like the idea of
children not getting enough to eat, they like people's parents dying
of easy to cure diseases, they like the idea of student debt causing
a lot of stress in a young person's mind, they like Gaza babies blown
to pieces, little baby arms dismembered, they like the idea of a
Muslim holding his dead baby crying, it isn't chill, not chill at
all.

4.
If you could have dinner with anyone - historical figure, old friend,
who would it be and what kind of restaurant would you choose?